Amnon Meisels – A short Bio

Prof. Amnon Meisels has been a faculty member of the department of Computer Science at Ben-Gurion University for the last 20 years. Served as head of the Computer Science dept.from 2004 to 2006. The main field of research of Amnon Meisels is Constraints Processing and in the last 7 years mostly Distributed Constrained Search. His book “Distributed Search by Constrained Agents”, was published by Springer Verlag in January 2008.

Since 2002 Prof. Meisels has lead a group of graduate students at BGU that have established algorithmic standards for distributed search on distributed constraints satisfaction problems (DisCSPs) and distributed constraints optimization problems (DisCOPs).

Prof. Meisels has served on the program committees of all major AI conferences that deal with constraints-based reasoning over the last 5 years. Specifically for Constraints Processing (CP conferences); IJCAI 2003-7; ECAI 2004-8; and the series of PATAT conferences on Automatic Timetabling, where he serves on the steering committee since 2000. In addition he has been part of the organizing committee of the series of workshops on distributed constraints reasoning (DCR series) every year since 2003.

Roie Zivan – A short Bio

Dr. Roie Zivan is a faculty member of the department of Industreal Engineering and Management at Ben-Gurion University. Currently, he is on sabatical with the Robotics institute at Carnegie Mellon university. Dr. Zivan has completed his PhD on Concurrent Search for Distributed Constraints Satisfaction Problems in the Computer Science Dept. at Ben-Gurion University in 2007.

Dr. Zivan has served on the program committees of some of the last major AI conferences including AAAI 2007, 2008, AAMAS 2009, IJCAI 2009. He was among the organizers of the distributed constraints reasoning (DCR) workshop at IJCAI-09 in Pasadena.

Important Research Milestones

Important research milestones of the DisCSP group of Prof. Meisels at BGU in the last 7 years include

• Asynchronous forward-checking & Concurrent search - algorithms for DisCSPs

• Asynchronous ordering heuristics for DisCSP algorithms (notably for ABT)

• Concurrent run-time measures for experimental evaluation of DisCSP algorithms

• Privacy preserving search methods for DisCSPs

• Asynchronous Forward-bounding for DisCOPs – establishing the phase transition

• Anytime framework for local search on DisCOPs

• Asymmetric constraints for DisCOPs – local search & complete search

Some Relevant Publications

R. Zivan and A. Meisels, “Concurrent Search for Distributed CSPs”, AI Journal, 170, pp. 440-461, 2006

A. Meisels  and R. Zivan, “Asynchronous Forward-checking on DisCSPs”, Constraints,

12, pp. 131-150, 2007.

R. Zivan and A. Meisels, “Dynamic Ordering for Asynchronous Backtracking on DisCSPs”, Constraints, 11, pp. 179-197, 2006.

R. Zivan and A. Meisels, “Message delay and DisCSP search algorithms”, Annals of

Math. & AI, 46, pp. 415-439, 2006.

A. Meisels, “Distributed Search by Constrained Agents”, Springer Verlag, London, 2008

I. Brito, A. Meisels, P. Meseguer and R. Zivan, “Distributed Constraint Satisfaction with

Partially Known Constraints”, Constraints, 14, pp. 199 - 234, 2008.

T. Grinshpoun and A. Meisels, “Completeness and Performance of the APO Algorithm”,

Journ. of AI Res. (JAIR), 33, pp. 223-249, 2008.

R. Zivan, “Anytime Local Search for Distributed Constraint Optimization”, Proc. AAAI-08, pp. 393-398, Chicago, July 2008.

A. Gershman, A. Meisels and R. Zivan, “Asynchronous forward bounding", Journ. of

AI Res. (JAIR), 34, pp. 61-80, 2009.

A. Grubshtein, R. Zivan, T. Grinshpoun and A. Meisels, “Local search for Distributed Asymmetric Optimization”, Proc. 9th Intern. Conf. Autonom. Agents & Multiagent Sys. (AAMAS-2010), pp. 1015-22, Toronto, May 2010.